Oracle vs. AWS: Larry Ellison Takes MySQL HeatWave to the AWS Cloud
Oracle vs. AWS: Larry Ellison Takes MySQL HeatWave to the AWS Cloud
An olive branch or another way to clobber the competition?
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For years, Oracle Chairman & CTO Larry Ellison has bad-mouthed AWS. And for just as long, Amazon execs have given it right back.
Exhibit A: “Larry Ellison Knocks AWS Over Outage” - CRN
Exhibit B: “Amazon Cloud Chief Jabs Oracle.” - CNBC
Now there’s a new twist on this long-running, no-holds-barred competition: Oracle plans to begin offering its MySQL HeatWave database on AWS.
Why is Oracle taking its latest (if not greatest) database platform into enemy territory?
Ellison answered that question on Oracle’s Q3 FY22 earnings call in early March:
“We're going after the Aurora user base and the Redshift and Snowflake user base,” Ellison said. “We want to make it really easy to convert from Aurora and Redshift, or Aurora and Snowflake, to Oracle HeatWave. And if we're running an AWS, for example, you press a button, a couple of buttons, and your data is moved immediately to Oracle MySQL HeatWave. You do not have to change your application at all.”
So Ellison, brilliantly, is planning to use Amazon’s own cloud platform to siphon off AWS customers.
But there’s another way to look at it: Oracle really has no choice because it’s losing database market share. Oracle can’t afford not to be on AWS, the industry leader in cloud.
Losing ground
The numbers tell the story. In Oracle’s most recent quarter, Q3 FY22, total cloud revenues for infrastructure and applications were $2.8 billion. By comparison, AWS just reported $18.4 billion for Q1 2022 — more than 6 times Oracle’s cloud revenue.
For years, Oracle was been able to fend off AWS in the database market, based on the strength of Oracle’s flagship database and its large installed base. But no longer. According to Gartner, AWS last year overtook Oracle in database revenue. You can read my analysis on that below.
So Oracle, the long-time market leader, slipped to #2 in 2020 and to #3 in 2021, per Gartner. The database market now stacks up like this: Microsoft #1, AWS #2, Oracle #3.
Oracle is losing marketshare not only to the hyperscalers — AWS and Google Cloud, in particular — but to cloud-native database providers such as Snowflake, Databricks, etc. So Oracle needs to up its game in cloud databases. Heatwave on AWS is one way to do that.
Of course, Oracle is a leading cloud services provider in its own right, and its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business grew an impressive 47% in FYQ3.
However, an all-Oracle stack — Oracle database on Oracle cloud on (in some cases) Oracle hardware — may be too much Oracle for some customers in today’s multi-cloud world.
AWS and the other hyperscalers are soup-to-nuts database and infrastructure providers. Want Snowflake? You can get it on AWS. Want CockroachDB, MongoDB, YugabyteDB? You can get them on AWS. Want Oracle HeatWave? Coming soon.
Oracle expands its multi-cloud
Oracle is positioning HeatWave-on-AWS as a multi-cloud play, and rightly so. Larry Ellison explains:
“We decided for the first time to make this a multi-cloud product,” Ellison said on Oracle’s Q3 earnings call. “So Oracle HeatWave will run already in the Oracle Cloud, but it is — we also have it up and running in AWS, and Azure users will be able to use it as well — so it is a multi-cloud product.”
Oracle’s flagship Oracle database has been available on AWS for some time, but, because it is a proprietary system, it’s not in the same peer group as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or other open-source databases. And that’s what many dev teams want.
MySQL HeatWave is a bonafide cloud-native, open-source database. So it puts Oracle on equal footing in what is arguably the most important database category today.
Caveat: Oracle has said nothing about making HeatWave available on Google Cloud, at least not yet.
What is HeatWave?
MySQL is a widely used open-source, relational database. Oracle gained stewardship of MySQL in 2010 via its Sun Microsystems acquisition and continues to provide engineering resources for ongoing development.
Because MySQL is open, MySQL and MySQL-compatible cloud services are available from many different database providers, including AWS (Amazon RDS for MySQL) and Microsoft (Azure Database for MySQL). MariaDB, a fork of MySQL, is another option.
What exactly is MySQL HeatWave? Here’s how Oracle describes it:
Oracle MySQL HeatWave is a fully managed database service, powered by the integrated HeatWave in-memory query accelerator. It’s the only cloud database service that enables OLTP, OLAP, and machine learning directly inside a MySQL database, without complex, time-consuming, and expensive data movement and integration with a separate analytics or machine learning service.
Oracle introduced HeatWave a year ago. Its big selling point is that HeatWave supports both transaction processing (OLTP) and query processing (OLAP), making MySQL a more versatile platform for enterprise workloads.
Since HeatWave’s introduction, Oracle has added automation for provisioning, data loading, query execution, and more. And in March, Oracle announced MySQL Heatwave ML, which incorporates ML models directly into the database, making it easier to scale up ML adoption.
Some industry analysts are positively gushing over HeatWave. I take many of those comments with a grain of salt because Oracle, by its own admission, does business with some of the firms, so it’s hard to know just how objective they truly are. You can read their glowing reviews here: “Leading Industry Analysts Praise the New MySQL HeatWave Innovations.”
A more balanced overview is this article on The Stack by Ed Targett.
If you can’t beat em, join em
As Oracle-on-AWS shows, the world of multi-cloud databases is bringing together strange bedfellows, forcing competitors to make joint offerings in the interests of their customers.
It’s (excuse the cliche) a win-win-win:
Oracle gains access to a wider base of potential customers.
AWS expands its cloud infrastructure offerings and usage.
Customers will be able to easily deploy Oracle’s newest database on their preferred cloud platform, be that AWS or Azure (though not Google Cloud).
Does this mean that Oracle and AWS will extend an olive branch to each other? Unlikely, but let’s see what they say at time of the formal announcement, if there is one.
Bottom line: It’s a necessary move by Oracle, but a good one.